


sutco setes

by viscrael



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Developing Friendships, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Tumblr Prompt, lance is a merman. keith provides him with donuts.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-22 01:39:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11957004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viscrael/pseuds/viscrael
Summary: He rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean. You’ve been staring at me like that for a while and it’s making me think you’re plotting something.”“Not plotting,” Lance assures, and he smiles again, his teeth very visible this time. “There’s just a lot to look at it, that’s all.”--lance is a merman, keith is a human who keeps bringing him sweets. undiagnosed pining takes place





	sutco setes

**Author's Note:**

> i wld like to thank not only god but also jesus for the fact that the prompt i was given by a friend of only "klance and a randomly generated number from a prompt list" ended up landing on "merfolk au"
> 
> its 1:45 am and i fkcign LOVE MERMAIDS YALL
> 
> have this

“Do all humans walk like that?”

Keith frowns as he sits down on the dock, folding his legs underneath him. “What are you talking about?”

“You know.” Lance uses his index and middle finger to mime walking, but the webbing connecting his fingers gets in the way of the demonstration. “Like _that_. The way you walk looks all funny.”

“It does _not_ ,” Keith snaps.

Lance laughs; it’s an oddly human sound, considering the shrill chirping Keith has heard him speak—merfolk language, apparently. Occasionally it seeps through into his English, but for someone who taught himself a foreign language completely from scratch, his pronunciation and grammar is almost untouched by the merfolk dialect.

“It totally does,” he says, and Keith huffs, unfolding his legs so he can cross them instead. He leans away from the side of the dock, shuffling the paper bag he brought with him behind his back so Lance can’t reach and take it.

“And to think I went out of my way to bring you food today, too.”

“You brought food?” Lance’s earfins twitch upwards in interest, and he leans closer to Keith from his spot in the water, trying to see around him for the promised food. “Where? What kind? Is it donuts?”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Keith says, reaching his arm around his back to push the bag further away just in case Lance tries to lunge for it. Keith has seen him propel himself pretty far out of the water a few times, to the point where it’s a little scary.

“Aww, c’mon, Keith! Are they donuts?”

Keith doesn’t answer.

“Fine, fine, I’m sorry for pointing out how weird you walk, I promise I won’t say anything about it again even if you look silly all the time.”

“That was hardly an apology.”

“Keith, _please_ ,” he whines. “I said I was sorry.”

“Didn’t mean it though,” Keith points out even as he grabs the bag from its hiding spot and reaches inside for the four donuts he’d bought on his way here. There are three chocolate ones with sprinkles for Lance and a plain glazed for himself. The first time he brought Lance human food to these hang outs of theirs, he made the mistake of only getting two servings. Lance’s dejected look when he realized he’d scarfed the entire thing down without first savoring it was enough to convince him to sacrifice his own serving, even if Lance never out-right asked that of him. Now he just makes sure to get extras.

“You _did_ get donuts!” Lance grins when Keith holds out the first one to him. He takes it surprisingly delicately, cautious from past experiences involving the water directly beneath him. At the very least, he props his arms up on the deck so he’s eating over the dock instead of the water, but he still doesn’t bother drying his hands first, so the donut itself gets soaked.

Keith doesn’t talk while Lance devours the first one, but surprisingly not because he’s nervous or unsure what to say. For once, he just doesn’t feel like saying anything. Things have been like that with Lance lately. There are very few people currently on this earth that Keith could sit in silence with and still feel comfortable, but somehow without realizing it, Lance found his way on that list.

When he stumbled across Lance almost six months ago now, Keith hadn’t expected the two of them to be friends. He hadn’t expected to ever talk to Lance at all, actually, or even to confirm that what he’d seen wasn’t a hallucination or a prank being played on him by some dumb teenager, but in fact a real person. Merfolk. Keith still feels somewhat stupid thinking of merfolk in terms of existing, but he has a very loud, very tangible reminder here to assure him that his belief isn’t unfounded.

After the first glimpse, Keith, who already had interest in cryptology as well as mythology, returned to the beach in hopes of catching whatever it was he saw just one more time. Lance decided to take matters into his own hands, however, and initiate conversation instead of agreeing silently to only watch each other from a distance. Lance is the type of person to make friends with anybody at any time for any reason, though, so knowing him now, his choice makes perfect sense.

Quite a few exchanges later—as well as months only spent warming up to one another—and Keith visits the beach at least three times a week if he can help it. The dock they meet at is more secluded than the rest, which is exactly why they chose it. It’s a nice system they have set up.

“What’ve you been up to today?” Lance asks after his final bite of the third donut. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You missed a spot,” Keith says, pointing to his own lower lip.

Lance blinks and raises his finger to the indicated spot, but the chocolate stays stubbornly there. “Did I get it?”

“No, just—here.” Keith fishes a napkin from the paper bag and dips it in sea water quickly to get it wet, motioning Lance forward. Lance does as he’s asked, and he stays surprisingly still while Keith wipes at the chocolate. “There.”

Even though Keith is done, Lance doesn’t move away. This choice leaves them close, closer than they were before, and he smiles broadly, just the hints of predator’s teeth peeking out from his lips. He has a bit of an overbite. “Thanks.”

“Um.” Keith puts the napkin in the bag and sets the bag aside. He’ll eat his donut later. “Any time.”

“So, my question. What’ve you done all day?”

“School,” he answers automatically.

“What’d you do there?” Lance asks. When they first started hanging out, Keith thought he was being patronizing or only asking to keep conversation going, but he’s realized that Lance is just genuinely curious about human culture and Keith’s everyday life. He once spent twenty minutes explaining in ridiculous detail his morning routine because Lance kept asking about it, down to the order he puts on his socks.

“I got put in a group project with Pidge,” he says.

“Pidge, Pidge…the small one with the glasses?”

“Yeah. You remembered this time.”

“Seeing that picture helped.” He smiles. “How’d the project go?”

“We haven’t started. We only had time to choose what historical figure we’re researching, so we’re starting on the actual work tomorrow…”

For all that Lance talks, he’s actually a really good listener. He sits with his arms on the dock, his head tilted onto his forearms. As Keith talks, he looks up at him, casual but obviously interested in what Keith has to say. When they first started talking, that would get uncomfortable sometimes, overwhelming during the worst of it. But Keith is used to it, like he is with Lance’s other small idiosyncrasies, and now he kind of likes seeing someone so interested in what he has to say even if he’s just ranting about how stupid an assignment was or telling a story about his brother.

Keith finishes his story with, “So I’m just reminded again why I wish I hadn’t taken Econ,” and Lance keeps looking at him long after they’ve fallen into silence, almost like he hasn’t noticed Keith’s done talking. His expression is intent, but soft. Keith narrows his eyes. “What?”

“What?” Lance repeats, although the look on his face doesn’t dissipate.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what? I’m just looking at you.”

“No, like _that_.” Keith gestures to his own face as if that’ll better articulate what he means. “I mean—you know. You’re looking at me all funny.”

“I take offense to that, Mister Apologize-For-Saying-I-Walk-Funny.”

He rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean. You’ve been staring at me like that for a while and it’s making me think you’re plotting something.”

“Not plotting,” Lance assures, and he smiles again, his teeth very visible this time. “There’s just a lot to look at it, that’s all.”

That isn’t the response Keith was expecting. His face heats up involuntarily.

At a loss for anything else to say, he only responds dumbly, “Oh.”

Before he can make anything else worse, though, Lance blinks, his attention flicking away from Keith for the first time in what feels like ages, and reaches around Keith to the donut bag. “Are you going to eat that?”

 

\--

 

Keith relents his glazed donut, mostly because he finds he doesn’t have much of the appetite for sweets anymore. He’s bought them much more frequently since becoming friends with Lance, and he hadn't even liked sweet things all that much in the first place. Soon he’ll be too sick of all the sugar to buy it. When that happens he’ll need to turn Lance onto other human foods to obsess over.

As he’s getting up to leave, Lance’s cold hand touches his ankle gently to get his attention. His skin is scaly, slick, and he never gets quite used to the feeling of it. He suppresses a shiver at the contact. “What’s up?”

Lance lowers his hand. For a second, it looks like he has something important to say, but Keith watches his will to say whatever it was leave him slowly, sees the apprehension and then defeat before he settles on something hopeful. He only asks, “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

Keith nods. “Of course.”

“Okay. Okay, cool. In that case, _sutco setes_ ,” Lance says— _see you later_ in his mother tongue.

Keith offers a bastardized version of the parting in return as he leaves with his empty paper bag and a promise.

**Author's Note:**

> comments r both fun and exciting and also if u ever comment on anything ive ever written id probably take a bullet for u
> 
> also, if u got this far, thank u sm for reading :'^)


End file.
